


Happy Landings For Another Day

by UnapologeticallyMeatwad



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Between Episode III and IV, Child Leia Organa, Child Luke Skywalker, F/M, Padmé Amidala Lives, Toxic Male Anakin Skywaler, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:54:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24807301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnapologeticallyMeatwad/pseuds/UnapologeticallyMeatwad
Summary: Padme smiles when Darth Vader enters the room, not because she is harboring any kind of bittersweet feelings for the man, but because this is exactly as she planned this caper with Obi-Wan. They agreed that if Padme took Bail’s meeting with the Empire, then it would be Darth Vader coming in Grand Moff Tarkin’s place.Otherwise, Darth Vader will be on patrol and none of this will work.“Darth Vader,” Padme forces on a strong smile despite the nervous twitch in her hands. “You look good.”Vader seats himself slowly, eying her all the while, as if considering whether or not he should respond. Ultimately, he swats at the air lazily. “Ha, ha,” his voice comes out oily and deep, so far from the soft voiced boy in Tatooine. His breaths are loud and she can feel how they must scrape his own frail skin behind the mask.
Relationships: Padmé Amidala/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 3
Kudos: 36
Collections: Little Black Dress Exchange 2020





	Happy Landings For Another Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shadaras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/gifts).



> Apologies in advance for all the Prequel jokes.

Padme smiles when Darth Vader enters the room, not because she is harboring any kind of bittersweet feelings for the man, but because this is _ exactly _ as she planned this caper with Obi-Wan. They agreed that if Padme took Bail’s meeting with the Empire, then it would be Darth Vader coming in Grand Moff Tarkin’s place.

Otherwise, Darth Vader will be on patrol and none of this will work.

“Darth Vader,” Padme forces on a strong smile despite the nervous twitch in her hands. “You look good.”

Vader seats himself slowly, eying her all the while, as if considering whether or not he should respond. Ultimately, he swats at the air lazily. “ **Ha, ha,** ” his voice comes out oily and deep, so far from the soft voiced boy in Tatooine. His breaths are loud and she can feel how they must scrape his own frail skin behind the mask.

Padme’s heard the stories of the android Sith Lord that is adept in  _ negotiating _ , but she never imagined  _ this _ to be what he looks like now. 

“Here to catch up?” Padme asks, seating herself at the opposite end of the long table, elbows resting on a scattered mess of papers. “I was expecting Tarkin.”

Darth Vader leans back and folds his arms together. “ **Your Rebels have stolen secret plans from us; you will pay dearly unless you surrender them back to me** .”

Padme blinks rapidly, grabbing her chin and leaning in. “Do you think I carry top secret intel on me?”

Darth Vader tilts his head to the side curiously. Padme absently wonders if the Emperor intentionally chose a mask for his overly emotional pupil that would hide his wide array of expressions. Like this, Vader is almost impossible to read. 

“ **If I have to, I may will the Force to —** ”

“You can’t,” Padme interrupts. Already, things have started off so intense. Though Padme has no sway over the Force, and thus no guard to prevent Sith Lords like Vader from entering her mind, Padme is confident she can  _ keep him out. _

She thinks of Obi-Wan’s soft voice in her ears, not any particular words, just the sounds he makes, how delicate his whispers are, how precise his pronunciation is. She thinks of the bounce in his voice whenever he knows he is telling a good joke. He grounds her. She stays strong.

Darth Vader groans and pulls away; Padme hardly notices he has already attempted to probe her mind. 

“ **You’re with him, aren’t you?** ”

His voice is deathly cool. 

Padme shrugs. It was never a big deal that Obi-Wan and her got together. After years of him helping her raise the children, their physical intimacy that started as platonic shifted. She stopped needing a friend to comfort her at every turn, and started to want someone to be there in the moments in-between.

“ **I’m aware of the children, you know.** ”

Padme frowns; he has no right to mention them. He nearly got them killed on Mustafar.

“You could have made it work, turned back to the light,” Padme sighs listlessly. “Betrayal is a classic trait of a Sith Lord.”

“ **I am planning on killing the Emperor.”**

This gets a rise from Padme. It’s surprising that the Emperor, this man Vader so eagerly defended time and time again before the Jedi Council, is now something he must loathe. She feels sorry for him, that this is what he’s become.

“That doesn’t mean you’d be a hero all of a sudden,” Padme sighs, reaching into her stack of papers and pulling out one in particular that needs some sort of Imperial Officer to sign off on. She slides it over to the table and though it doesn’t make it even halfway, Vader uses the Force to make it flutter to his hand. 

“It’s more complicated than that, Anakin,” Padme shakes her head.

* * *

Obi-Wan hasn’t had this much fun in a while. Sure, his wife is several stories below dealing with his former mass murdering pupil, but Obi-Wan can sense it in the Force that Padme is holding her own,  _ and _ Obi-Wan gets to swashbuckle with these Grievous-lite bots. 

Obi-Wan doesn’t even know why the Empire bothers nowadays — they seem to think that if they give any kind of Droid a powerful weapon it will do just fine, but it takes  _ skill _ to wield these electric sabers and Obi-Wan downs them fast. But it still beats the kinds of stealth missions he’s been committed to lately.

The plan is simple — take advantage of Vader’s obsession with Padme to break through and steal some vital information for the Rebels. Long as Padme holds Vader’s focus, he won’t sense Obi-Wan in the Force.

“Freeze!” a Clone Trooper, or, erm, a  _ Storm _ Trooper barks. Obi-Wan slides to a stop, eying the eight soldiers around him, their blasters glowing red and aimed at Obi-Wan’s head.

Obi-Wan sighs. “Really? I think you should all know what happens when you shoot at a Jedi.”

“Oh shit, he’s right!” one Storm Trooper yells.

The one next to him elbows him in the gut. “Quiet! He’s just trying to psyche us out! FIRE!”

The blasters go off and Obi-Wan rolls his eyes. He could easily spin his blade around himself a few times and scoop away all the blaster bolts, vollying them back at their owners. But his latest apprentice could benefit from some practice probably. So instead Obi-Wan grabs at the force in eight directions, all blaster bolts freezing in the air. They shimmer, struggling to slip from their respective air pockets they’re locked in, but none are able to make progress.

Obi-Wan cups a hand to his mouth, “Luke! Get down here!”

Little Luke Skywalker pounces down from a girder above and activates his blue lightsaber. Only ten years old and he’s already well trained. He eyes the first bolt carefully and winces, lining up his blade.

“What’s he doing?” one of the Storm Troopers asks.

Oof, that Storm Trooper better not be a former Clone Trooper because Obi-Wan is  _ positive _ he trained them better than this.

Like a game of tee-ball, Luke smacks the bolt out of the air and it flies right into the neck of the idiot Storm Trooper. The troopers scream and prepare for their next shots but by then it’s too late; Luke slides through the Force as if he were wind, and volleys the rest of the bolts back. 

Obi-Wan grins, ruffling the boy’s hair and struts past the smoking corpses. The computer they need to hack is a few feet away and already, Leia is on it, tiny hands scrambling across the keyboard, her small, focused face lit up by blue light from all the monitors.

“Someone’s ahead of schedule,” Obi-Wan muses.

“Yeah, well some of us don’t need to take things slow so they can quip at every goon they fight,  _ Ben _ ,” Leia growls.

“Hey now,” Obi-Wan pats her on the back. “Where’s this anger coming from?”

“ _ Oh, hi, um, Master Kenobi? _ ” Leia says in mock imitation of her five year old self. “ _ Are you the Jedi who fought in the Clone Wars with my mom?” _ She furrows her brow and gets very surly in her imitation of Obi-Wan. “ _ Oh, no! No, I’m just, uh, I’m Ben Kenobi! Totally different guy.” _

Obi-Wan shakes his head and stretches a hand over the keyboard; he wants to give the password a whirl. He’s got a good idea as to what it is, but Leia swats him away.

“I got this,” she growls.

Obi-Wan rubs his hand. “Yeah, yeah, alright.”

* * *

Papers flutter through the air and a pen whisks up alongside them. Padme can only imagine Vader is using the floating pen to sign each document. He doesn’t even seem to be focusing on what they say, he’s just doing what she asked of him — perhaps out of obligation? Regardless, Padme doesn’t like it.

“You shouldn’t be making exceptions for me,” Padme sighs, getting out of her chair and working her way around the table.

Vader tilts his head towards her and snaps his fingers. The myriad of papers roll together and fall onto the table in a neat pile. Only one paper is left and this one he holds in his heavy, black gauntlet. “ **This one needs Grand Moff Tarkin’s sign-off,** ” and he tosses it to her. It glides over, somewhat romantically and falls into her hands.

“Anakin,” she sighs.

“ **There are some things that not even Darth Vader can do.”** She wonders if he is attempting to make a joke. Anakin used to joke so often, but Vader is humourless. As humourless as the Jedi he purged from this world. 

Padme shakes her head and gets close to Vader. She hates being this close, hates how she fears what he might do as retaliation for something so slight. He rises alongside her, towering over her, and stares down. 

“You can’t make up for what you did,” Padme says with gritted teeth.

“ **No** .”

“I’m happy now, I have a family.”

**“Yes.”**

“I won’t let you hurt my people.”

Vader says nothing to this, just nods. He seems to be drifting and after a few moments, Padme catches on, possibly too late. He’s sensing something in the Force, staring up through the slabs of metal above that hide Obi-Wan from his sight. 

“ **I sense something,”** he muses. “ **A presence I’ve not felt since…** ”

“Look at me, Anakin,” Padme snaps. Her voice is cold enough that it seems to ensnare him well enough. 

**“What are their names? You’ve hid them well from me.”**

“And I will keep hiding them.”

**“Fair, I suppose,”** he grunts, “ **Do they know about me?”**

Padme hesitates; she shouldn’t tell the truth, but she’d rather be honest. “Yes. It would have been easy not to, but they deserve to know the truth of you. Of what you did to our Republic. Why we fight this war with  _ you _ .”

“ **I don’t regret what I did** ,” he growls, and she can feel the agitation, how it quickens his breathing, how it rots his body. “ **The Jedi were too powerful. Not even you can deny that, Padme. They scared you as much as they did me.”**

Padme nods, turning away. Vader was born from the free will the Jedi stole from their knights, so Anakin Skywalker made the only choice that would alter anything. But he was wrong. Obi-Wan being with her and still having control over the Force, still being  _ good _ , proves that.

**“I am…** ” Vader pauses, trying to find the words. It must be hard for him. “ **...sorry for what I did to you.”**

Padme steels herself.

“I don’t think of you much at all.”

* * *

Minutes later, Obi-Wan and the kids have the intel they are looking for so it’s time to go. Obi-Wan walks ahead with Luke while Leia packs up her hacking stuff, when a white double helix of energy materializes around the two.

“Ray shields?” Obi-Wan spits out. 

Little Leia clicks her tongue. “What happened? You’re smarter than this.”

Obi-Wan smirks; his daughter is always trying to kick his teeth in, and she’s quite good at it.

“Deja vu, I suppose,” Obi-Wan sighs. “Luke, what do you…”

Luke looks up at him and mimes pulling on an invisible mustache. It’s a code, the same code his evil father would use back in the day. Though the kids have never met Vader, they have picked up on so many of his verbal tics and mannerisms. 

With a plan in mind, Luke and Obi-Wan plunge their lightsabers into the metallic floor and immediately twirl around each other like dancers. 

The blades cut deep into the floor, igniting it into hot molten metal, before shattering the floor enough that Obi-Wan and Luke drop down to the next floor. Obi-Wan releases his lightsabers and grabs at the Force, preparing his landing. 

After all, Obi-Wan likes to land on things and say, “ _ Another happy landing _ .” But Luke, eager to keep cutting, does not reach for the Force and when they strike the floor below, he keeps drilling. Which is not necessary. 

“Luke, stop!” Obi-Wan cries out but it’s too late. Luke drills through that floor, and then the next. What commences is an imitation from  _ Aristocasts _ where the cats are like, dancing?, on this piano and they make it crash through all the floors in a building. It’s kinda like that, except Luke’s unharmed since he’s drillin’ and Obi-Wan is just flopping around like a total stooge.

After maybe seven stories of straight falling, Obi-Wan manages to get in front and stops Luke. Which leads to Obi-Wan’s body flopping right into a long white table. Pain shoots through his whole body and when he pushes himself back up, he finds himself looking straight into the mask of Darth Vader.

Obi-Wan pushes the hair from his eyes. “Uh,  _ hello there! _ ”

A groan comes from Darth Vader’s lunges, one powerful enough to shake the room. He raises his hand and clenches them, likely to kill Obi-Wan, but his groan goes faint when Padme swings a chair into the back of his head and conks him out.

Like a tree falling in a forest, Darth Vader leans to his left and collapses flat on the ground. Obi-Wan just stands there slack jawed, very focused on a very sweaty Padme. At the very least, he is most certainly proud of her.

“Wow,” Luke sighs.

Padme grins, eyes flashing with urgency, knowing they need to run  _ now _ , but she does hook the chair over her shoulder like it’s a hatchet.

“Looks like Sith Lords are my speciality too, Obi-Wan.”

* * *

“The most powerful Jedi in the world and yet you defeated him with a chair,” Obi-Wan chuckles, moving in long strides in-sync with his wife.

Padme chuckles, the chair still slung over her shoulder even though they’re safe on the walkway to get to their getaway ship. “His focus on me made it hard for him to use the Force.”

“Yes, yes,” Obi-Wan drawls. “But I still feel at fault here; it’s embarrassing to see your apprentice being taken down in such a way.”

Padme shrugs. “You’re focused on  _ that _ ? I figured your biggest hangup would be that your apprentice took over the galaxy.”

“Ooh,” Obi-Wan purses his lips. “I’m liking this spice from you. I take it your negotiations with him were emotionally difficult?”

Padme sideyes him for a moment; she does tend to go to humor when she’s hurting nowadays. Much like Anakin. Old Anakin. 

“I suppose. I think if we had tried this a few years ago, we would have failed. But I did my part, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” Obi-Wan grins, and turns on his heel, back thunking against the hide of the ship while Luke gets settled at the controls. “You know you don’t have to do these things though, right?”

Padme sets the chair down. “Hm?”

“Well, with the Jedi Order, being asked to do things at the expense of your own soul was common,” Obi-Wan gestures at the air. “I don’t want you to do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable.”

“Ah,” Padme rasps. “If that were the case, I’d have said no immediately when you painstakingly proposed this plan.” She looks back to him, feigning a scrunchy-faced Obi-Wan. “ _ Padme, I think it’d be best if you are the one to talk to Darth Vader, because, well, um, you know, you two, ah, have history, and  _ — ”

“Everyone’s making fun of me today!” Obi-Wan says with such mock frustration. “Besides, it’s  _ awkward _ asking someone to confront their evil-ex. I hope the day you ask me to do the sam— well, I don’t have an ex quite yet, but in a similar situation, I hope you approach it with the same wiffy-waffleness as I.”

Padme grins and elbows Obi-Wan in the side. “Anyways, I did it for me. I needed that. I needed to face him.”

“And hit him with a chair?” Obi-Wan asks. 

“No, just talk to him,” Padme sighs, motioning for Obi-Wan to follow her into the ship. “I’ve spent the past ten years afraid of him, hey — later,” she sighs when Obi-Wan mistakes her gesture for an invitation to smooch. 

“Ah,” Obi-Wan rasps. “I’m just messing up like crazy today. Apologies.”

“No worries,” Padme grins, “But even when he was a kid I always felt smaller around him. He’s been so controlling and today… well, I felt taller than him. 

“I needed that reminder. We’re stronger than him, always.”


End file.
